Nude Photos Are Sealed At Smithsonian

Published: January 21, 1995

NEW HAVEN, Jan. 20—
The Smithsonian Institution has cut off all public access to a collection of nude photographs taken of generations of college students, some of whom went on to become leaders in American culture and government.

The pictures at first were taken to study posture. Later they were made by a researcher examining what he believed to be a relationship between body shape and intelligence.

All freshmen here at Yale and at some of the other colleges and universities involved were required to pose in the nude. Among those who were presumably subject to the practice are George Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it is not known whether their photos ever wound up at the Smithsonian, which, although having made its collection of the pictures available to researchers, has never displayed them.

"There are the rights of the subjects to consider," Ildiko P. DeAngelis, assistant general counsel at the Smithsonian, said today in explaining its decision to seal the entire collection, even to researchers. The pictures will remain off limits, she said, until the Smithsonian completes an investigation of how it acquired them and whether it has rights to them.

The frontal and profile "posture" photos were taken beginning in the early 1900's as part of physical education classes, because poise and balance were considered an integral part of health.

Later, other photographs were taken by W. H. Sheldon, a researcher who believed that there was a relationship between body shape and intelligence and other traits.

Mr. Sheldon has since died, and his work has long been dismissed by most scientists as quackery. But it was apparently respected from the 1940's through the 1960's, because highly regarded colleges like Yale, Wellesley, Harvard, Princeton, Vassar and Swarthmore allowed him access to their students.

Much of Mr. Sheldon's work was destroyed by various colleges years ago. But an article last Sunday in The New York Times Magazine disclosed that the Smithsonian still had some of the photos.

Yale officials had thought that they had long ago burned all the photos of their students. After receiving calls from alumni, some distraught and others mildly amused, Yale and Mount Holyoke College asked the Smithsonian this week to cut off access.

Ms. DeAngelis, assistant general counsel at the Smithsonian, said it was too early to determine whether the pictures would be destroyed. One question is whether the photos have historical merit even though the science behind them is no longer considered valid. "Any kind of historical movement," she said, "the history of science itself, is educational."

George L. Vogt, a member of Yale's class of 1966 who is now director of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, said that Mr. Sheldon's written records of his scientific pursuit, however odd, should be saved but that the photos should be burned.

"Our naked butts are in the Smithsonian," Mr. Vogt said. "I can understand why the Smithsonian would want to record the quack science of the time, but I cannot understand, nor can I accept, that they would retain naked photographs of living people."